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A Time Magazine Person of the Year Speaks on National Security, Secrets, and Ethics

February 01, 2010

After Coleen Rowley
graduated from college and law school, she wanted a career in law
enforcement and public safety, and happily went to work for the FBI
in a Midwest bureau office. Ironically, she landed on the cover of
Time magazine as one of its three “Persons of the Year” of 2002 for
speaking up about critical mistakes the FBI made that may well have
compromised the nation’s safety on 9/11. Specifically, in
August 2001, agents in the Minneapolis FBI Office became suspicious
of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French Moroccan who sought flight training
in Minnesota to learn how to fly a 747––without proper pilot
training––and which he explained was just for “ego boosting”
reasons. If the Minneapolis FBI request for an emergency
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act search had not been denied,
other 9/11 hijackers might have been discovered before 9/11.
Rowley wrote an account of where she saw the problems with the hope
of helping the agency correct deficiencies and better protect
America’s citizens. She found out there are sometimes career risks
to telling such truths. Still, some applauded her courage. Rowley
and two women who tried to warn their corporate superiors about
unethical financial practices at Enron and WorldCom—companies that
imploded in costly corporate scandals––were all honored by Time
that year as “The Whistleblowers.”

Rowley is now retired from the FBI, but remains committed to
issues of public safety and accountability in government. She will
share her passions for these topics Wednesday, when she visits
Saint Leo University’s Student Community Center to deliver the
final lecture of the 2009-2010 Distinguished Speaker Series. She
granted an interview to give the Saint Leo community a brief
insight into her upcoming presentation. Her talk is free and open
to the public.

Question: Can you review what has happened, from your point of
view, from 9/11 to now?

Answer: Most people are now aware there were significant “dots” or
pieces of information that, if they had been pursued and connected,
could have prevented or minimized what happened on 9/11. But very
few in the intelligence community and government had any incentive
to tell the full truth afterward about how they had messed up.
Nobody is going to say that “I stamped a visa for a hijacker,” or
failed to pass on information, etc. It’s just not human
nature to come clean when there are so many, intertwining mistakes
that contribute to such a tragic event. So cover-ups often
ensue after a problem and the cover-up tends to be worse than the
original mistakes.

The Bush administration did not want any investigation of what had
gone wrong. When I got a chance to testify at the “Joint
Intelligence Committee Inquiry,” I wrote a memo to clarify the
details of the failures I was aware had happened in the Moussaoui
case. I also delivered copies to the FBI director, two
Intelligence Committee senators and to FBI internal affairs.

By serendipity, the memo got a lot of publicity. My memo led
to an exhaustive Department of Justice Inspector General
investigation and report, about 400 pages long, that was issued in
2004. And indirectly it factored, along with pressure from widows
and family members of 9/11 victims, into the Bush Administration’s
empaneling of the 9/11 Commission.

Q: From your experience, do we have enough legal protection for
whistleblowers from employer retaliation?

A: People in power usually don’t like bad news
(certainly including news of fraud, waste, abuse, illegalities or
public safety problems) and usually don’t want to makes
changes. So the typical response is to fire the person who
brings these things to light or makes a complaint. The
private sector was slightly better after the Sarbanes-Oxley
legislation gave some protection to corporate whistleblowers.
This law was designed to protect investors from companies that
might try to issue misleading financial statements but the law
actually hasn’t worked out too well in practice. In the
government sector, there is supposed to be some protection in
agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and others, but
protection from job retaliation has rarely worked. In the 16
intelligence agencies, there’s no enforcement of whistleblower
protection, essentially because it’s believed that secrecy is more
important. If agency management wants to silence someone,
it’s easy to yank an employee’s security clearance, and there’s
very little recourse.

U.S. citizens are the victims in all this, because they’re the
ones who eat the tainted hamburger, take the drug that hasn’t
been properly tested, or pay more taxes for contractor fraud,
etc. There’s no way an average person would have any way of
knowing all this. And as I said, fraud, waste and abuse is not
confined to the government. Corporations are much worse
because they have a profit incentive.

Q: How do you view the recent case of the delayed identification
of the Christmas Day 2009 airline bomber, the man who was allowed
on a plane with a bomb hidden in his underwear?

A: To a large extent, the little bit of truth and accountability
that did come out regarding the mistakes leading to 9/11, came too
late. In the interim, there were all kinds of wrong responses
that fueled terrorist incidents in the world. What we’ve done
with intelligence collection is to open the floodgates to
collecting more “dots”––all kinds of information about people is
going into databases, but if you’re looking for a needle in a
haystack, it’s like we’re adding more hay and it makes it harder to
connect the dots. It would be better to be more careful and
only collect relevant information. That’s one of the reasons why I
think we are now potentially less safe than before 9/11.
Photos from Coleen Rowley’s website.